Coming to America (from Korea)

In 2015, Jung-ho Kang became the first hitter to jump directly from the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) to the major leagues. This year, two more hitters – Byung-ho Park, for Minnesota, and Hyun-Soo Kim for Baltimore – will attempt to make the same trip.

Here’s a a draft that I worked on last January but never completed

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Pittsburgh’s recent signing of Jeong-Ho Kang – or Jung, or Jeung, transliterations vary – got me into taking a hard look at the KBO in order to make a set of translations.

Kang’s real statistics have been very impressive, especially in two of the last three years.

The .345 EqA in 2014 was good enough to lead the league; the .336 in 2012 earned him a second-best mark. He’s certainly in the mix in trying to figure out who the best hitter in Korea has been over the last three seasons – I would narrow it down to these four:

Kang is the second-youngest of them (Byung-ho Park is 9 months younger), and, rather crucially, is a shortstop. (You can ignore the DH numbers on his stat lines; that’s just a default when no fielding data is available).

Kang’s power explosion in 2014 is not all him. The Korean league’s offensive levels have gyrated around quite a bit over the last five years, spanning a range over 1.5 runs per game:

The National League, by way of comaprison, has ranged from 4.45 RPG in 2010 down to 3.95 last year. The 1930 NL – when Bill Terry hit .401, and Hack WIlson had 191 RBI – that league had a very comparable 5.68 RPG, the only NL season since 1900 over 5.5. It is a crazy high hitting environment. So you know, right away, before I even start to talk about the difficulty level of the Korean league, that those numbers are going to have to come down.

Part of the reason for that is expansion. The KBO started in 1982 with six teams, gained a seventh team in 1986 and an eighth in 1990. A ninth team was added in 2013, and a tenth will join in 2015. As generally happens when league expands, there was an immediate quality drop – the year-to-year comparisons, which had generally been improving by abou 1.5% per year, instead dropped 1.2% in 2013. League officials tried to compensate in 2014 by increasing the number of allowed foreign players from two per team to three. As a direct result of that, there were 10 players with US playing experience who made their debut in Korea in 2014, and they put up the following stat lines:

Remember, in an unadjusted EQA the league average is always going to be .260, by definition. So everybody (with the exception of Brad Snyder, who wasn’t in Korea to start the season; he only went overseas after the Rangers released him in June) was at least in the neighborhood of average. Eric Thames was the only player who really filled a starring role, though, finishing second in the league in EQA and 3rd in EQR.

We can take a similar approach on other players who have played in Korea and the US prior to 2014. These are all players who went to korea after having played the prior three years in the US major or minor leagues – not Japan, not Mexico, no missing years. That nets us Cory Aldridge (Korea 2011), Mike Cervenak (2006), Hee Choi (2007-2009, compared with US 2004-06), Doug Clark (2008-10), Jacob Cruz (2007-08), Victor Diaz (2009), John Gall (2006), Ryan Garko (2011), Bryan Myrow (2006), Calvin Pickering (2006), Scott Seabol (2006), and Wilson Valdez (2008).

I’m going to use the player’s previous three years of translated data in the US as their “established value”. Here’s how that looks in a plot:

It is a moderately good fit, although it is distorted by five really low outliers at the bottom center of the picture. Those five belong to

Ryan Garko – while his three-year established value was .244, that consisted of a .269 three years pre-Korea, .265 two years prior, and .190 the year before. His performance in Korea was entirely consistent with someone whose real value is around .200.

Brad Snyder – who washed out of the US in June and came to Korea in mid-season.

Scott Seabol – who washed out of the US in June and came to Korea in mid-season.

John Gall – who washed out of the US in July and came to Korea in mid-season.

Mike Cervenak – who washed out of Korea and came back to the US in June.

Removing those players from the equation leaves us with this better looking graph:

That’s where I left off. Nothing above really needs to change. We can update the chart with league hitting stats:

Year BA OBP SLG OPS R/G
2010 0.269 0.353 0.404 0.757 5.07
2011 0.265 0.347 0.384 0.730 4.54
2012 0.258 0.337 0.364 0.701 4.12
2013 0.268 0.353 0.388 0.740 4.64
2014 0.289 0.368 0.442 0.810 5.64
2015 0.280 0.360 0.431 0.791 5.22
And see that offense remains high in Korea. However, the allowance of more foreign players was very successful in raising
the quality of the league - as I measure it, league strength was up almost 5% from 2013-14 and held steady in 2015 despite
further expansion.
As I noted above, Byung-ho Park, the new Twin, was one of two players I rated as a better hitter than Kang last year, and he
continued to do well in 2015: